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By Edward Bond. Directed by Eda Holmes. Until Oct. 12 at the Court House Theatre. 1-800-511-SHAW.

The normal anticipatory mood of a Shaw Festival opening night was ratcheted up several levels on Friday for the premiere performance of The Sea by Edward Bond.

The reason was that the play’s director, Eda Holmes, is high on the lists of candidates likely to inherit the reins of power from current artistic director Jackie Maxwell at the end of next season.

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Holmes, in fact, is probably the favourite “inside” candidate, one who has worked with Maxwell for most of her tenure. She is an associate director of the festival and someone who has staged numerous productions over the past decade.

The fascinating thing about Holmes’s work is that some of it has been downright brilliant (Arcadia), some totally appalling (One Touch of Venus) and a lot of it kind of in the middle (Misalliance).

So to anyone trying to handicap her chances at the festival’s No. 1 job, this summer’s production of The Sea acquires added importance, just as some shows this season have possibly offered the kiss of death to other wannabe artistic directors.

The bottom line is that Holmes has done a very interesting job on this complicated play, displaying a lot of her strengths but not tying all its disparate elements together in a satisfying enough way to make you say, “She’s the one!”

Bond’s play is set in a seaside town on the east coast of England in 1907 and it’s a strange mixture of class comedy, science fiction and metaphysical ponderings.

A young man dies trying to sail his boat in a terrifying storm. Did the people on land help him or hinder him? Was he trying to kill himself? What role did his best friend play in the proceedings?

Answering those questions would be enough for a conventional playwright, but Bond is anything but and, having raised those points, he then largely ignores them, concentrating on a demonic draper named Hatch, who slashes away at his fabric as though he were the Sweeney Todd of textiles.

Then there’s the raspberry seed in his wisdom tooth, grande dame Louise Rafi, a Lady Bracknell with a penchant for amateur theatrics. Both of these unlikely antagonists have their own followers, drawn on gender and class lines (his are lower and male, hers are upper and female) and the battles they wage are hilarious yet frightening, coming to a conclusion that Joe Orton would have smiled on from the beyond, having died six years before The Sea was written.

All the play’s leading characters meet on the beach for a funeral, where the young man who perished just before the curtain rose is due to have his ashes scattered into the waves. But everyone shows up with their own agenda and, as they like to say in the season ticket brochures of theatres specializing in bedroom farces, “hilarity ensues.” Only, this hilarity involves the deceased’s ashes being flung in everyone’s faces like so much afterlife confetti.

There’s a surprisingly tranquil ending, with a battered old rum-pot offering some astonishingly valid philosophical views of the universe before the plot resolves itself in a way that I’d be a cad to reveal.

The writing throughout is brilliantly witty, yet savagely political. And there are moments when you think you’re watching a play with a severe case of multiple personality disorder.

This is where Holmes is both very good and slightly deficient. Like all of her best work, it’s informed by the fact that she was a dancer and choreographer before turning to direction and the show moves like Pina Bausch had decided to settle down in Grimsby for a few weeks.

There are numerous scene changes involving billowing blue draperies (the waves of the sea) that are initially dazzling, then slightly tedious. The action swirls around in high style, but sometimes you stop and wonder what a certain moment actually means.

Another Holmes virtue is her ability to get wonderfully unbridled performances from her cast and Patrick Galligan gives the performance of his career as the mad draper with science fiction fantasies. Sometimes hilarious, sometimes heartstopping, Galligan truly goes the distance and takes us with him.

Then, as Louise Rafi, there’s Fiona Reid. The sentence can stop there, because anyone who saw Reid at Shaw earlier this season knows she is truly in her prime. She’s our Maggie Smith, Judi Dench and Helen Mirren all rolled into one. No dame was ever grander or funnier, or more possessed of a profound melancholy underneath.

I also adored Julia Course and Wade Bogert-O’Brien as two young would-be lovers who were real, impassioned, attractive and compelling.

And Peter Millard makes sheer magic out of the play’s final moments as the beach bum who proves the accuracy of the old saw, in vino veritas.

The Sea is full of wonderful moments, but it’s not a unified wondrous experience. Is it Edward Bond’s fault or Eda Holmes’s? I don’t know. But if I were the Shaw Festival search committee, I’d very much still keep her on the list.

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